Would users buy an SSD just because it has an animal printed on the
label? If so - what animal should it be?

Marketers use animal
brands for products for a variety of reasons. And there are hundreds of examples
of fluffy, cute and fierce
animal brands
already in the storage market. Animal brands used in the SSD market
aren't chosen just for their cute and cuddliness. They have been used to
suggest toughness, durability, speed and other desirable characteristics as
you can see in the examples below.

........

Examples of
animal branded SSD product lines

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I learned something new when I expanded the
image of an enterprise SSD family (launched in July 2011) from
Huawei Symantec.

When
I noticed the picture at the left hand corner of their enterprise rackmount
system I saw something which looked like a swordfish. And googling it confirmed
that yes -indeed - the dorado is a type of swordfish - as well as being
the brand of a tier 1 FC SAN
SSD.

A-DATA - changed its
logo in January 2010 to include a hummingbird - shown below. What
has this got to do with its
SSDs?

Nothing.
In my view this is just one of those soft and cuddly animal metaphors. As you
might expect - the company - which targets consumers had a more elaborate way of
describing cute and cuddly... This is what
A-DATA
said when it launched the hummingbird logo

"A posture with
agility represents the wide range of technological development. The lightweight
and flexible wings portray the phenomenal speed with which ADATA provides its
customers with the most comprehensive services and solutions within the shortest
time. The energetic character signifies to explore the unknown and to
continuously discover the possibilities of applications..."

Are
you still awake after reading that?

In the advisory email sent to
editors it called this rebranding theme - "Fly, Catch, Go!"

I
didn't make this up. My editor's comment at the time was - "Presumably 99%
of the marketing budget went into drawing the pictures - which didn't leave much
for the text."

Angelbird is the
name of a company which develops
PCIe SSDs. The company
says that its "ArchWings" concept will let users upgrade capacity by
adding cartridges.

I'm
unsure why that name was originally chosen as the company name. This could be
one of those examples where a cute cuddly animal image was chosen to give
customers a warm fuzzy feel. Perhaps appropriate - given the company's cold
artic-like origins in Norway.

FalconStor - had
been in the storage market since 2000 - but it wasn't until 2015 - with the
launch of its FreeStor SSDcentric pooling and migration platform - that I
thought it appropriate to add the company to this list.

Foremay -
used Cheetah in the name of its 2.5" SATA SSDs (July 2009) and
Dragon in a PCIe SSD product (October 2009). The
company later dropped animal names from the product ID and used numbers
instead. (With one of the
numbers SC199 enduring through more than 7 years of flagship products.)

Marvell has various
animals in its chip and
controller product
lines. In the SSD market it has test marketed a product called the DragonFly - a
PCIe SSD.

It's not the first dolphin or fish to
adorn the logo of an enterprise SSD company. And it won't be the last either.

The appeal factor in these aquatic metaphors may be the grace and flow and
the ability to seemingly just glide through the air and the water almost
effortlessly.

Memtech (until its
acquisition by STEC in
2005) used a herd of animals. These included:- Bulldog, Hornet, Mustang ,
Panther and Wolverine for product lines and Elephant (which never forgets) in
its company logo. See some examples below.

Memtech also used the speed
metaphor - "Rocket" - for one of its SSD product lines.

Saniffer
(which distributes SSD testers and analyzers in China) uses a dragon in its
company logo.

The company said its name "Saniffer" is
derived from combining two English words: SAN and Sniffer...

..........

Vanguard
Rugged Storage - has used a hybrid of Cheetah and Rhino to brand the
company and (at one time) its SSD product lines. The company also uses zebras,
bulls and other creatures for other types of products.

Savage IO - is the
name of a rackmount SSD white box company (arrays of COTS SSDs for high capacity
embedded markets). The company's logo includes and suggests the talons of some
savage creature - although the systems themselves are designed to be
conservatively reliable with overkill RAS features.

The company's use of the SaberTooth metaphor (see below) is trying to
suggest speed. You have to imagine a SaberTooth tiger - because the animal
image isn't shown (just the words) running as fast a speeding bullet (which is
shown).

PhotoFast started
marketing various types of SSDs in 2009 - under the
G-Monster brand. The
idea behind many of these products is that they are a lot faster than most
other consumer SSDs.

There are many strains of the G-Monster gene -
different shapes for different SSD form factors. They remind me visually of the
toys called transformers.

Platypus Technology
(no longer in business) was a one time maker of
NAS compatible
SSDs. It used the Platypus
in its logo (see below).

Why a Platypus? - because the company was
founded in 1999 in Sydney, Australia - and this is an iconic and unique animal
which is only found naturally in that continent.